Russell Banks
THE BLIZZARD
A low, mottled grey sky, smooth and unbroken in texture.
The man stands, hands jammed in pockets, next to the neatly stacked,
head-high woodpile, looking first up at the sky, then down to
his
feet,
and he smiles beneath his thick moustache and shakes his head, as
if
remembering something that had been funny long ago and only
to him. Taking long strides, he crosses behind the bam and walks
along the side opposite the house, moving gracefully through high,
brown meadow grass to the front, where the driveway ends.
As
he
passes near the car, a Volkswagen sedan, he
flips
his hand down
and without breaking his stride raps the vehicle once on the roof. He
is a tall, not heavy, man, with a huge head made even larger by
the bushy, dark brown moustache that droops across
his
lower face.
He moves with a strange, hurried grace: there is an urgency to
his
walk and in the slightly forward
tilt
of
his
shoulders and head, as
if he has not been able to make himself altogether comfortable
in·
side his body. His large, heavy hands swing with relaxed precision,
however. He can reach out great distances and touch quickly, with–
out first having to think of it, whatever he wants to touch. They are
the kind of hands that would be good with tools but clumsy with the
buttons of his own clothing. He walks to the side entrance of the
house, reaches forward and opens the door, and
as
he brings the
rest of his body into the house, he grins and says into the kitchen,
We'll have snow tomorrow. Then he closes the door behind
b,im.
When I become cold, it begins in my feet and fingertips and
quickly moves in from there.
As
long
as
those far extremities are
warm, even if I have no hat or coat on, the rest of my
body
stays
"
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•
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